Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

So what's Bitcoin have to do with it? Seems like that's a gimmick. Just provide a normal refillable/subscription account, then pay out the websites. Isn't that what Flattr or some such company already does? Onboarding customers with Bitcoin is a sure way to avoid making money. You could pay out on the backend with BTC but that's a minor detail.

With current Bitcoin you can't even do micropayments. So they're almost certainly looking at doing some grouping and batch pay system anyways.

View on HN

Yes, and they take a 15% cut for doing so.

(Bitcoin was supposed to support disintermediation, but it hasn't worked out that way. So was the Internet, yet now half of all traffic goes through Google or Facebook.)

> With current Bitcoin you can't even do micropayments.

False. https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments

This seems to be a protocol to coalesce multiple payments between a single sender and receiver, provided that the sender is willing to commit money up front. It does nothing for the case where a single sender wants to send one-time payments to multiple receivers, nor the case where many individual senders want to send to one receiver. In those cases it would only add overhead.

In the case of Brave it doesn't help them much since there is no real-time requirement, so they could accomplish the same by increasing the time between payouts. With some engineering they should be able to support literally thousands of users before they need to take everything off-chain.

That still requires 2 transactions for every (user, site) pair. On a network that can do 10 transaction/second total. It might be usable for certain classes of micropayment, but certainly not for a "every website I visit" scenario.

I agree, but 10TPS is actually about 4x as many as Bitcoin can handle. It's more like 2.7TPS with actual usage:

https://www.quora.com/How-many-transactions-per-second-shoul...

There are a few ways to do bitcoin micropayments. There's lightning payment channels, probabilistic micropayments [PassShelat 15,16].

There are a few developments trying to crack down the micropayment Holy grail

Reply on news.ycombinator.com